Distracted driving demo creates dialogue

According to the National Safety Council, cell phone use while driving lead to 1.6 million crashes each year and 11 teens die every day as a result of texting and driving.

    On Thursday, October 26,  the Save a Life tour came to talk to North Harford’s junior and senior class about distracted driving, a presentation that greatly impacted many NH students.

    Junior Jared Hedrick said, “the assembly really was eye-opening and it showed what happens when you actually get into a car crash and how it affects your life.” Hedrick added, “I learned that it is something that needs to be taken very seriously and it’s something that happens more often than people would think it does.”

    After coming out of the assembly junior Gillian Ribeiro commented “I went out differently understanding how people deal with the fact if they hit someone and how emotionally traumatizing it can be.”

    Along with the distracted driving assembly, the Save a Life Tour also offered a texting and driving simulator and a drunk driving simulator. These simulators were offered to juniors in the school gym. Most juniors said that the simulators made it significantly harder to drive.

    When asking Madilyn McDaniel about the difficulty of the simulator she commented, “It started getting harder the more I turned and the faster I went and then the wheel started jerking out of my hands, that wasn’t me that was the wheel jerking and it everything went downhill from there.”

    After this McDaniel will also say “I am never going to get in a car with a drunk person or a distracted person ever in my life. Nor will I be that person because I’m not dying and I’m not going to kill anybody.”

    After students heard about  and then went on to experience distracted driving many of them signed a pledge. This pledge reads “I pledge to never give in, to never let my phone win, by not tempting fate, I will power down and concentrate, I know the text and call can wait.” After pledging Gillian Ribeiro says “I’m pledging that I will be the safest I can when I’m behind the wheel.”

    Save a Life Tour’s employee Christopher Rich had multiple things to say about the message.  The one he expresses is the most is  “how hard it is later on in life if you make those poor choices, what they can lead to.”  

    He added that  poor decisions later on in life can be very hard for a person and  weigh a person down.  Rich said most people want  greater things in life, and in order to do that  “You want to set yourself up for good graces for who you’re going to be tomorrow.”